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August, 2017

The term “improperly configured” is a real plague on the IT landscape.

It can refer to a firewall protecting an enterprise; it can create problems on a web server. For one newly minted smartphone company, it can also look pretty embarrassing.

Essential phone recently sent an email to customers asking for proof of identity. This request was a little odd in the first place — who does that anymore? The email basically asked customers to send a picture of a photo identification or passport by email. From a security standpoint, that’s a bit like asking people to text your credit card number to a hacker.

The term “improperly configured” is a real plague on the IT landscape.

It can refer to a firewall protecting an enterprise; it can create problems on a web server. For one newly minted smartphone company, it can also look pretty embarrassing.

Essential phone recently sent out an email to customers asking for proof of identity. This request was a little odd in the first place–who does that anymore? The email basically asked customers to send a picture of a photo identification or passport by email. From a security standpoint, that’s a bit like asking people to text your credit card number to a hacker.

Brick-and-mortar retailers have been finding it difficult to offer pricing that’s competitive with e-commerce sites, which have the advantage of massive scope and scale, according to a report Frost & Sullivan’s Stratecast service released Wednesday. E-commerce will account for nearly 18 percent of the total retail market by 2025, the report projects.

Blue Ocean, the new user interface for the popular Jenkins continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) platform, will begin incorporating insights into code quality trends and static analyses, under an improvement plan detailed this week by the project’s creator.

The goal is to improve the developer’s visibility into the health of software projects, Blue Ocean creator James Dumay, director of project management at Jenkins technology vendor CloudBees, said. Plans also call for expanding the capabilities of Blue Ocean’s visual pipeline editor to better match what is available in Jenkins’ declarative pipelines for software delivery. The development team intends to outfit Blue Ocean with these capabilities in the next six to 12 months.

Old-school PCs may be déclassé, relegated by pronouncements of technology Trotskyites to the dustbin of history because smartphones and tablets and wearables and who knows what else, have or will soon take their place.

Not in corporations, they won’t.

PCs still lord it there, said Spiceworks, an online community and resource for IT professionals and the vendors trying to reach them.

“It turns out desktops still rule in the workplace … and it’s not even close,” wrote Peter Tsai, a senior technology analyst. According to a Spiceworks survey conducted in July, 60% of the employees in organizations represented by 998 IT professionals in the U.S., Canada and the U.K. relied on a desktop PC as their primary computing device.

(Reuters) – Cash has begun flowing again from the Federal Reserve’s steel and cement vault in Houston, heading for banks in the hurricane-ravaged region after several days of flooding halted armored-truck deliveries and stranded employees overnight.

Researchers who typically required a week of effort to dissect cryo-electron tomography images of the 3-D structure of a single cell will now be able to do it in about an hour thanks to a new automated method.

(Reuters) – German automaker Volkswagen’s U.S. plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee, is building 400 Atlas SUVs a day, close to capacity and on pace to reach 100,000 per year, Matthias Erb, who heads VW’s North American engineering team, said on Thursday.

Mobile app use has become a powerful habit among U.S. consumers, based on new research findings. An increasing number of users have been spending their time consuming video, music and social media on smartphones and other mobile devices, but many are reluctant to try new apps. A large percentage of mobile app users’ time is spent on apps like Facebook, Snapchat, Twitter or Instagram.

PARIS (Reuters) – French media group Vivendi reported better than expected core profit growth for the second quarter on Thursday and confirmed its outlook for the year, saying its struggling Canal Plus pay TV arm was showing signs of improvement.